Not Your Grandpa’s Nuke

Say “nuclear power” in a crowd and the reactions are going to include “Three Mile Island”, “Chernobyl”, “Hiroshima” and many more, all negative. Nuclear power in this country hasn’t seen any development in decades. With the price of crude hovering around $100 a barrel, cheap power is on everyone’s mind. Enter Hyperion Power Generation. The company is just over a month old, but it’s coming from Los Alamos National Laboratory (they know nukes), and HPG hopes to have units in production by 2012. Scientist Otis Peterson filed the patent for the nuclear fission reactor in 2003. The reactor uses uranium hydride crystals and hydrogen isotopes to create an internal, self-regulating balance. The portable nuke is about the size of a hot tub and encased in concrete. It would be buried on site and connected to a steam turbine to crank out 27 megawatts of power for five years — enough power to drive 25,000 homes. That would “refuel” a lot of Tesla Roadsters.